


silence

by Balthuza



Series: wine, spices and flames [1]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Gen, apparently i like making myself sad, origin before origin story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-07
Updated: 2018-12-07
Packaged: 2019-09-13 18:25:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16897689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Balthuza/pseuds/Balthuza
Summary: Glenna never stops dreaming about the day the templars came.





	silence

Glenna never stops dreaming about the day the templars came. 

The alienage is quiet, but she can feel the eyes on them. The metallic sounds of the heavy armors feel like a sentence, and she can't help but hold her little girl a bit closer. 

They do not fight. The leader of the templars approaches them with her sword unsheathed, and they know. The only thing they can change is whether or not the last thing Bei will see of her home is her parents bodies on the threshold. 

When in her dreams she hears her daughter crying, Glenna curses human gods, the templars, the traitor that gave their daughter away, but first and foremost, curses herself. The way her hands shook and hesitated, and let go, the words that she did not say, the fear that bound her feet to the ground. 

Fingal’s hair goes white within a month and his heart gives up before the first snow melts. 

Glenna buries him and sells the house, just so she could afford to buy wood to burn in the middle of the night. The tiny room in the back alley that she rents for most of the money she earns every month is almost bare, and it is a long time until she learns how to live with the silence. 

 

The mages blindside them all. Trapped in the cage, like an animal, Glenna wonders if this is her punishment for letting the templars take her little mage. Then there's fire, and ice, and storm, and the woman stands over the slaver like the death personified, all straight and proud. It is a surprise to see the pointed ears, hidden under the helmet during the fight, and the way her fingers automatically check how her braids look like. With detached perspective of one that made peace with their own mortality, Glenna can almost see Fingal’s braid, just as fiery red, glittering in the sun like fire. The elven woman looks oddly tall, unbent by work and humiliation, nothing like the elves in the alienage. 

Then another elf calls a name and Glenna freezes. It can be a coincidence, it has to be, but her old heart refuses to let go of the hope, even as it breaks, seeing Bei’s cold eyes slide over her face with no recognition whatsoever. 

They are gone before Glenna manages to get out of the cage and say a word. The slaver is left at the mercy of the alienage, but she could not care less. 

Glenna dreams of cold eyes that look like hers and straight backs, and reunions, and steels herself to approach the group when they come back. 

The archdemon comes first. 

The last thing Glenna sees are fires in the distance, bright and red like her husband's and her daughter’s hair, and wonders what would be different if she spoke up, the past and the present melting into one another in her mind, unrecognizable and unforgiving. 

While her daughter screams orders in the battle less that ten steps away from the house she was born in, Glenna passes away in silence. 


End file.
